Blogs & Articles: Lightning in the Wild: Victoria Kayak đź”— 3 years ago
- Category: Blogs & Articles | Breez Technology - Medium
- Author(s): Roy Sheinfeld
- Published: 15th July 2021 13:41
In the story of the 47 Ronin, there’s this great quote:
No matter how spectacular their beauty, the deer hunter never sees the mountains.
It expresses the idea of tunnel vision, focus. The deer hunter is so focused on his activity and his prey that he becomes blind to the implacable beauty of his surroundings. He’s so engrossed that he missed billions of tons of rock covered in picturesque trees and softly falling snow.
Building a Lightning platform is sometimes like that. It’s a constant stream of technicalities: rebalancing a channel, chasing down a bug, wrestling with an intransigent API, rebalancing the channel, responding to users’ queries, rebalancing the channel, pushing out a new release, taking a call with a VC, finishing that blog post, rebalancing that $#%& channel.
It’s all too easy to let the backend become our deer, the thing we focus on to the exclusion of all else. But the backend is just a means to another end — the frontend, to be exact. And we know that most Lightning users live in that frontend. That’s where the future of the Lightning economy will be decided.
Lightning is only as good as its UX: how users use it and how they feel when using it. Therefore, it’s important to gather that data, to go out and actually, y’know, ask them.
That’s the point of this post, which is likely to grow into a series. The idea is to shift the focus from abstract “use cases” back to concrete users. Let’s have a look at the people actually using Lightning, how they use it, what they need it for, what they love about it, what they don’t, and what they’re hoping we’ll yet be able to realize.
So without further ado, allow me to introduce you to a fantastic, visionary business that has Lightning up and running: Victoria Kayak.
How a Kayak company got their feet wet with Lightning
First, the vitals: Victoria Kayak is located in the lovely inner harbor of Victoria, Canada (contact info below). They rent out equipment and run kayaking tours around the southern tip of Vancouver Island, showing off the breathtaking coastline and charming aquatic megafauna.
Although Victoria Kayak has been in business since back when grunge was a thing, they got into bitcoin relatively recently. And as for many of us, the epiphany came in waves. It all started “when one of our guides requested to be paid in bitcoin in 2017.” Then came the familiar learning curve:
…in one year we went from zero knowledge of Bitcoin, to our first bitcoin purchase on a hot wallet, then to a cold storage wallet, then running a Raspiblitz node, then a second Umbrel node. This plus thousands of hours of YouTube and podcasts had us ready to at least try to accept bitcoin as a method of payment.
Of course, many businesses and probably even a few banks have gotten as far as educating themselves and maybe even purchasing some bitcoin as an investment. But Victoria Kayak was jump-started into actually accepting bitcoin as a currency in their day-to-day business transactions. And as in so many other cases, that kick came in the form of money-printer-go-brrrr:
The final touch came in the spring of 2020 when the halving occurred — that is what really motivated us. Our business was shuttered and we were trying to work out how to pay the bills. Meanwhile governments around the world went crazy with money printing … then Bitcoin programmatically cut supply issuance in half. That got our attention. That is when we fell down the rabbit hole.
Paying (It Forward)
Not only did Victoria Kayak start educating themselves about bitcoin; they also took the next step of figuring out how to leverage Lightning for over-the-counter payments and bringing other local businesses into the fold.
The Raspiblitz and an in-house Lightning node is what made the … ahem … penny drop. From there, they learned about Breez and its POS mode from Ben Perrin at BTC Sessions, a fantastic resource on bitcoin and Lightning. They also started to think about other options and how to build their local network:
… Ultimately we would like some kind of integration with our CheckFront (checkfront.com) booking system (shout out to another local Victoria, BC company). They do a great job integrating credit & debit card payments, but we would love to see some kind of built-in Lightning invoicing system.
They also have advice for others considering the same step. Basically, start close to home and work outward:
Start with your staff first — we did not and had to play catch up and dispel FUD. We held an informal meet-up and orange-pilled them by getting them to download Breez and then transferring some sats to each of them and having them transfer the sats between each other. Our crew are young and tech savvy and they “got-it” right away.
It would be easy — and tragic — to underestimate this kind of interaction. I can write all day about the 1001 advantages of bitcoin on Lightning, but that’s basically preaching to the converted, one deer hunter talking to other deer hunters about all the pretty deer in our backends (phrasing? I know what I said). But one business like Victoria Kayak encouraging their customers, team, business partners, and peers to use Lightning and showing them how is a priceless service for the future of Lightning. They’re onboarding their local community onto a kayak headed straight for the moon.
Innovation o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶r̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ in the water
I interact with users all the time. They’re generally pretty expressive about what they want, what works, and especially about what doesn’t. Most of that interaction, though, happens through a screen, mediated by Twitter, Telegram, or GitHub. You can do a lot with a screen, a keyboard, and some fast fingers, but certain ideas about how to respond to users’ needs can only arise in one-on-one interaction, across a counter, next to a cash register (or POS-enabled mobile device).
Victoria Kayak has that kind of direct contact, and it’s allowed them to come up with one of the most creative, yet simple, onboarding schemes in the entire Lightning economy. It’s as innovative as anything I’ve ever heard of, and it could only have occurred to a small business based on customer-focused, one-on-one sales rather than remote user adoption. Check this out:
We decided to go with a fixed BTC/sats price for our products. This was to help ease our crew (staff) into Bitcoin as well and try to keep things as uncomplicated as possible. We didn’t want to deal with a bunch of price conversions at the time of the sale.
So we simply assumed a price of $100,000 CAD for bitcoin and set the BTC product price to that — it makes for super simple math too! Right now, with bitcoin at about $45,000 CAD, customers who choose bitcoin are realizing a 55% discount. We even decided to cover the sales tax for them as well, saving them another 5–12%.
That kind of foresight should embarrass the big banks. Victoria Kayak is incentivizing their customers at the register to use bitcoin with, like, a 60% discount (!). Who’s going to turn that down? Even if a customer had never touched bitcoin before, how many will be willing to spend 10 minutes before the tour starts to download the Breez app and quickly buy some sats on MoonPay if it means saving about $300 on a family’s full-day tour?? Let me put that another way: who’s not going to spend 10 minutes for $300?
And Victoria Kayak, of course, is incentivizing themselves too. Recouping that discount is easy because all they have to do is hodl for maybe a year or two. So this endearing, local, small business is going to earn themselves an annual ROI of maybe 20% or more after giving their customers a 60% discount.
Numbers go up. This is why and how.
Beyond what this discount structure is going to accomplish for Victoria Kayak, it’s great for Lightning and bitcoin. I’d say it’s onboarding on steroids except that it’s perfectly fair and beneficial for everyone involved. It’s an onboarding strategy on fresh air and vegetables and a good night’s sleep. I would never have come up with it, but the idea is too good not to be copied, and other small businesses out there that are thinking about Lightning could do just that.
Join the Fleet!
Victoria Kayak is showing the world — and us — new horizons of Lightning’s potential and all the cool stuff it can do already. It’s instructional and inspirational. It lifts our spirits, confirming the worth of our effort so far, and it gives us a direction for future development. What should we work on? Well, what would Victoria Kayak do?
Learning about how people use our tech is valuable, and the value increases as we gain more data points. If you want to tell us how we can help you to build your business, how you’re using Lightning, and how you’d like to see it grow, please contact us. We’d love to learn from you too. Lightning in a bottle is pretty, but Lightning in the wild is absolutely beautiful.
Wanna have some active, outdoor, slightly-fishy-smelling fun? Here’s where to find it:
Victoria Kayak Tours & Rentals Ltd.
1006 Wharf Street (Floating)
Victoria, B.C.
Canada
V8W 1T4
+1 (250) 216–5646
info@victoriakayak.com
Lightning in the Wild: Victoria Kayak was originally published in Breez Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
